Kyle Petty rips drivers, calls on NASCAR to penalize blocking following Nashville Ally 400

Kyle Petty is fed up with the amount of blocking taking place in NASCAR, particularly during Sunday’s Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway, and is calling on the sanctioning body to step in.

Sunday’s race featured a record five overtime attempts, with cautions happening each time before the leader took the white flag. Petty said the issue was the blocking taking place at the front of the field on restarts and believes NASCAR should start fining drivers for doing it throughout the race.

“I don’t consider blocking racing but that’s what was going on [between Denny Hamlin and Ross Chastain],” Petty said. “Now we get to the overtimes. One overtimes, two overtimes, three overtimes, four overtimes, five overtimes. What is the world coming to? A fuel stop was only 60-70 laps it seemed like. We ran more overtime laps than you run in a regular fuel stop. These guys have to do a better job on these overtimes. We can’t have these wrecks, and all these wrecks are starting the first three or four rows.

“Circle back to blocking. These guys are trying to get everything they can on restarts, [and] I completely understand that. But taking each other out, knocking each other out — these are the greatest drivers in the world, and they can’t run three laps. What is up with that? They’ve gotta get better about this. You can’t have that. NASCAR has gotta step in and say two attempts, one attempt, I don’t care, when is racing gonna come back into this sport and blocking be a penalty in the sport? It has to be at some point. It has to be a penalty to take a guy’s line away and to intentionally block.”

Kyle Petty proposes NASCAR blocking rule following Nashville race

The race went 31 laps past the scheduled 300 and saw multiple cars running on fumes during the overtime attempts. Joey Logano notably went 110 laps without pitting for fuel and stumbled across the line to secure his first checkered flag of the season.

Petty said that NASCAR should implement a system where blocking isn’t allowed during green-white-checkered attempts.

“Do like Formula 1, do like other sports, get one or two during the race and that’s all you get,” Petty said. “Once you use that juice up, you’re out. So, when it comes down to the end of the race, and everybody’s through blocking, we’re gonna have some great green-white-checkereds.”